A moving, meticulously researched, elegantly constructed work of nonfiction.
A perceptive and intelligent work about mental illness from the New Yorker staff writer.
In her debut, Aviv illuminates the shortcomings of modern psychiatry through four profiles of people whose states of being are ill-defined by current medical practice—particularly by those diagnoses laid out in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Throughout, the author interweaves these vivid profiles with her own experiences. When she was 6, in the wake of her parents’ divorce, Aviv was diagnosed with anorexia despite her abiding sense that that label was inaccurate. Later, the author writes about taking Lexapro. “To some degree, Lexapro had been a social drug, a collective experience,” she writes. “After a sense of uncanny flourishing for several months, my friends and I began wondering if we should quit.” Aviv applies her signature conscientiousness and probing intellect to every section of this eye-opening book. Her profiles are memorable and empathetic: a once-successful American physician who sued the psychiatric hospital where he was treated; Bapu, an Indian woman whose intense devotion to a mystical branch of Hinduism was classified against her will as mental illness; Naomi, a young Black mother whose sense of personal and political oppression cannot be disentangled from her psychosis; and Laura, a privileged Harvard graduate and model patient whose diagnosis shifted over the years from bipolar disorder to borderline personality disorder. Aviv treats her subjects with both scholarly interest and genuine compassion, particularly in the case of Naomi, who was incarcerated for killing one of her twin sons. In the epilogue, the author revisits her childhood hospitalization for anorexia and chronicles the friendship she cultivated with a girl named Hava. They shared some biographical similarities, and the author recalls how she wanted to be just like Hava. However, for Aviv, her childhood disorder was merely a blip; for Hava, her illness became a lifelong “career.”
A moving, meticulously researched, elegantly constructed work of nonfiction.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-60084-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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